MacCast: My updates, thoughts and comments

11:24 am Developer preview available today with Leopard to ship in coming Spring — That will be ahead of Vista. Yeah.

11:14 am Enhanced iChat — multiple logins, visibility, animated icons, video recording, and tabbed chats, keynote presentations, back drops, photobooth effects, etc. Looks like some nice new and fun features. I hope voice recording quality is better than what we currently have in GarageBand. The PhotoBooth effects will be fun. Plus you have green screen so you can now be “anywhere” and have an iChat, too cool. I am sure business users will find being able to present Keynote presentations remotely a nice addition.

11:09 am Webclip — New button in Safari that will allow you to easily create widgets from some of your favorite web content. I like this concept. I am sure WebClip has other benefits in Safari too.

11:06 am Dashboard — Dashcode developer environment, well not a surprise, but it should make it so we have even more great widgets from 3rd party developers. I like Dashboard and find it useful so I will always welcome more productivity to my Mac. Plus, widgets are personal so you can pick the OS enhancements that make sense for you.

10:58 am Mail — Major enhancements. stationary added, notes added, to-do’s added. Stationary basically allows you to build graphically style email.They will have templates, but you could create your own. It must work like iCards and generate a PDF or JPEG as an attachment. Interesting. Notes can be used to send quick email reminders to yourself, good for those of us who are forgetful I guess. To-do lists are self explanatory, but didn’t we have these in iCal already? I guess there will be better integration which will be nice.

10:47 am Next generation of Spotlight — Enabling spotlight to search OTHER machines if you have permissions, nice if you need to see if you have a file on another machine on your network or at home when you are at the office. More advanced search and easier way to use it as an Application launcher (can you say QuickSilver?)

10:44 am 4) Virtual Desktops — Finally, what took so long? I think these should have been in OS X from the beginning. You can drag info from one desktop to the other, that is a nice touch.

10:43 am next gen front row & photo booth built into leopard — Again expected, but what are the new features? Top secret?

10:42 am shipping all as part of leopard boot camp will be included — That was to be expected.

10:32 am 2) Time machine — Backup for all of you who don’t backup (even though I tell you to 😉 ). Essentially on the fly backing up to backup to HD, or server. Think of it like auto-save with versions. Nice concept. Of course you will need to have a volume to back up to, but with room for 4 drives in your MacPro you have no excuse. Eliminates the accidental “save-over” problem. Nice. Of course Apple adds their eye candy with a cool “time warp” effect to take you back to your lost file. Sweet.

10:30 major things in leopard demo: 1) support for 64 bit applications. in leopard – giant leap forward – extend support all the way through UI framework into applications. have a fully native 64 bit UI carbon app, but completely 32-bit compatible (important) with no emulation, no translation
full support.

10:25 am “Redmond – start your photocopiers” — Apple is going to have fun with Leopard. The marketing is great and Microsoft is a good target at the moment with all the Vista delays.

10:18 am XServes — Entirely new. Based on Xeon processors and similar in performance to new Mac Pros. Now the entire line is Intel, the transition is complete and has happened in just 210 days, not bad.

10:06 am other great thing – 3/4 of macs shipped were intel-based — We’ll aren’t 3/4 of the models Intels? This just makes sense.

10:05 am of new purchases, 50% are new to the mac — I sometimes wonder where they get their figures, but this is good news. Lot’s of switchers.

There are reports of as 5.8 ghz wireless at the WWDC that seems to only work on the new Macbook Pro. Maybe this means a new Airport Base station optimized technology in the new models. I know the Intel Macs added support for 802.11a and that can operate in the 5GHz range.